September 26, 2013 AT 3:00 am

First up from AS220 is [Matt Stultz] who has been experimenting with filaments other than the usual ABS and PLA. He gave a talk at the 3D Printing stage where he introduced the crowd to High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS), an amazing filament that produces unimaginably smooth objects, but can also be dissolved away with Limonene. This allows [Matt] to create objects with incredible overhangs with direct-off-the-printer mechanical builds such as gear trains and transmissions possible in the future.

If you’re running a 1.75 mm extruder, I highly suggest you pick up a spool of HIPS from Filaco just to play around with. It has the same dissolvable support qualities of PVA, but it also produces wonderful prints to boot. If the people running Filaco read this, I highly suggest you make some 3 mm spools of HIPS because somewhere around half the market has 3mm hot ends.

Along with HIPS, [Matt] also showed off two interesting filaments you need to feel to believe. The first is Laywood, a type of PLA embedded with wood fibers. It doesn’t exactly feel like wood, more like a big chunk of MDF that someone had taken a rasp to.

Laybrick, the PLA infused with chalk dust to emulate a stone texture, also made a showing at [Matt]‘s table. It feels a little like a very fine-grained sandstone, but isn’t cool to the touch as a normal stone should be. With a greater infill, [Matt] should be able to come up with something that really does feel like a natural material.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!